Wednesday November 16, 2005
Wednesday November 16, 2005 ZFS Announcement on OpenSolaris - and Question of Voice
The "Welcome to the ZFS Community" announcement on the frontpage of OpenSolaris.org has a very succinct and to-the-point opening paragraph:
"ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use."
and the closing sentence of the announcement is worth repeating as well:
"Give it a spin, and let us know what you think!"
I've been asking that the announcements on the front page of OpenSolaris.org be personally signed and be written in conversational voice (not the written voice that so many of us learned during our education which is formal and stuffy and fails to capture the reader's imagination!) I agree with much of what Kathy Sierra says in her "Your user's brain wants a conversation" and "Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass" posts. I also appreciated Stephen O'Grady's discussion of the importance of voice as well in his "The Problem of Voice: On Paul Graham, Press Releases, and More" post. If you haven't thought about the role of voice, or think conversational voice is only for "dummies", I encourage you to read the above posts and start caring about the readers you lose as a result of using "formal voice", "press release voice", "man page voice" and "legal voice".
This announcement is signed by "The ZFS Team" (who on the ZFS team wrote it, I want to know!) so at least it is signed. And it does appear to be written in authentic voice. So, thanks to the ZFS team for a an announcement that is not robotic. And a question for all my readers - what do you think of the language in the ZFS announcement? Is it conversational enough? Does it keep your attention? Does it seem authentic?
If you want to know more about the Zettabyte File System, read the rest of the OpenSolaris announcement about ZFS. Or check out the ZFS community here. And be sure to check out the inaugural ZFS Screencast that I blogged about earlier this morning. Enjoy!
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: ZFS
(2005-11-16 12:10:39.0) Permalink
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